Okefenokee!

My father and brother came up for a visit (yesterday and today) and we had a lot of fun. Today we went to the Okefenokee Swamp Park, and Pressley had a fantstic time, between the boat ride, the train ride and the snake show. I took lots of pictures... Enjoy! I'm too tired to write more.

Alligator, sunning himself with some turtles.

With Pressley on a bridge over the swamp

Gator.

Gator again.

More gators.

Mmm. Lunch.

Mmmm. Dinner.

Mmmmm. Dessert.

Why remodeling is sometimes a bad idea.

Well, unless the owners of The Green House (who are asking double my original budget) decide to come down to my original budget, it seems that I won't be buying it. It's a shame, really, because in many ways the house is adorable. From the outside it is perfectly adorable. It was built in 1902 or thereabouts, with a huge front porch, high ceilings and a tin roof, and it has been painted green with cream trim. From the outside, it is my dream house. The front part of the inside of the house is fairly perfect too (if you discount the fact that whoever did the remodeling put up particle board instead of sheetrock! Now why would someone do that? The four front rooms (two bedrooms, a living room and an absolutely enormous kitchen) were located to either side of a central hall, with high ceilings and many large windows, and were just about perfect. The house has central heat and air (we tested the central heat, and it worked great). The kitchen was bigger than my mom's kitchen, and her kitchen is pretty big. The only flaw in the front portion of the house was that there wasn't a vent for the stove in the kitchen, so that would have to be installed.

The back half of the house wasn't as perfect as the front, although I found no flaws in the back bedroom itself. The first of the two bathrooms wasn't anything to write home about, but it was an adequate bathroom with tub, toilet and sink - what more do you need, right? The problem came with the very back room, what would have probably been a back porch in 1902, and later enclosed to make a laundry room. The remodelers had, for some reason, decided to turn it into a second ("master") bathroom. I suppose that in theory this was a good idea, but they did an utter hatchet job of it. Aside from the fact that they hadn't finished the job (leaving a back-door that wouldn't open, with a gaping hole above it), it was ugly, and left the house without a laundry room. If I bought the house, I know that I would end up ripping out that bathroom and turning that rear room back into a laundry room.

We decided that I should check out the attic. (I should probably mention that the realtor let us into the house, then left for another appointment.) Mom went home to get her ladder (a half-sized ladder, unfortunately), while I amused myself by figuring out where the original fireplaces (alas, no longer there) has been located. When mom arrived, bearing ladder, I ventured into the attic. The entrance to the attic was in the "master bathroom," and was a tiny little Jane-sized hole in the ceiling. So, up I went. I had to stand on the top step of the ladder (you know, the one labeled "Danger: This is not a step!") and then hoist myself up through the little hole (a nice shoulder-wrenching process that I'm going to feel tomorrow). The attic was fascinating! It was huge, and had it not been home to quite so many spider-webs, I might still be up there. I could see the original ceiling (the remodelers had lowered the ceilings, probably to make the place cheaper to heat - although even with the dropped ceilings, they were still pretty high), and the lathe and plaster of the top portions of the walls, a defunct chimney, and the attic's back window. Like I said, I found it fascinating. Unfortunately, I also found that there was absolutely no insulation whatsoever, neither in the attic nor in the walls (which I could see down from up there).

So, there's definitely a lot of work still to be done (did I mention that there are no telephone jacks or plugs for a washer/dryer?), and unless the owners are willing to come down to my budget, I guess I'll be without The Green House in my future. Sigh. It is absolutely adorable though. What do you think?

Doesn't it look perfect?

So adorable...

But then there's the back. If you look to the right, you'll notice that the back stairs lead up to the miscolored wall, and that the door (which doesn't open) has an opening above it and no stairs below... and the first window to the left of the discolored wall (around the corner) is walled over on the inside to make room for the "master bathroom." Now, if they had just left that back room alone...

Yo, Saturnalia.

The morning of December 25th, my mom and I heard on NPR a segment (originally aired a few weeks ago) about the ancient holiday of Saturnalia in pre-Christian Rome, and about the notion of Romans getting all peeved about being told merry Christmas instead of the traditional greeting of Yo, Saturnalia. Satire? Humor? I didn't really hear most of it (and I can't find the transcript, although there seems to be mention of this topic elsewhere on the web), but I've totally decided to start saying Yo, Saturnalia. It's fun!

According to Wikipedia:

The Saturnalia originally were celebrated with a public banquet. It became one of the most popular Roman festivals which led to more tomfoolery, marked chiefly by having masters and slaves switch places, which led to widespread drinking and debauchery, so that among Christians the (lower case) word "saturnalia" came to mean "orgy". The customary greeting for the occasion is a "Io, Saturnalia!" — io (pronounced "yo") being a Latin interjection related to "ho" (as in "Ho, praise to Saturn").

Yo, Saturnalia. Anyhow, after opening our presents (thank you to all), we set out to continue house-stalking. After discovering a large number of old, empty homes (just waiting for me to buy them, except for the fact that they weren't for sale...), and then decided to stop by one that was actually for sale. I had seen its picture online, which immediately made me want to go and see it in person. Now, the house is about double what I would ideally like to pay, but I think my mother and I have both fallen in love with the place, and assuming someone doesn't already have it under contract (No house-buying harm! Keep your fingers crossed!), we're going to go poke about the insides tomorrow. Wish me luck!!

Mom's xmas tree; Dusty in the wrapping paper

After wrapping up our xmas morning house-stalking, we headed off to Frank's (north of Live Oak, FL) for xmas dinner. Dinner was scrumptious: shrimp bisque, shrimp, caviar (courtesy of my students), veggies and rice and lamb chops. Accompanied by champagne and eggnog with cognac. Mmmm.

Red Caviar

Mom and I eat caviar

We spent the night at Frank's and drove to Lake City, FL the next morning. And here I thought I would finally be able to have a winter holiday without Lake City for once in my life, and there we were, dammit. We visited my mom's friend Kathy and then took her sister (another Kathy) out for lunch and made our way back to Waycross. I was all excited that we were going to go look at a house, but the real estate office was closed, xmas having fallen on a Sunday making Monday the public holiday. So, we try again tomorrow. That's my story. Yo, Saturnalia.

Ghost Train! (and other things)

The first order of business today was house-stalking. My mom and I drove back out to the neighborhood where we had seen the two old, empty houses yesterday, and wrote down their addresses. Now, if you had an un-used empty house or two in a city with nearly no house market worth talking about, wouldn't you react positively to someone calling you up out of the blue and offering you a lump sum of cash to take the thing off your hands? Well, we shall see. Next thing we have to do is look up their contact info at the Property Appraiser's Office. We also found one cute house for sale, but upon looking it up online, it turns out that it's about ten grand over my miniscule budget. And while one might assume that a nicely remodeled interior would be a plus, I actually found the pictures of the almost "cutesey" interior a bit of a turn-off. So, I'm back to the notion of offering strangers money for their uninhabited crapshacks.

After writing down home-site addresses, we decided to head out to Kingfisher Landing, which is essentially a boat ramp giving access to the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge. Now, as such, I didn't expect to find much of interest there... but then out of the corner of my eye, off in the woods, I spotted something old, large and made of rusty metal. So, I set off to investigate... and lo and behold: Ghost Train! Complete with ghost-tracks, heading out into the swamp! Now, aside from the fact that Waycross used to be a big hub for passenger rail transit, the Okefenokee was harvested for timber in the early 1900s, and rail lines were set down into the swampland for the purpose of getting the loggers in and the timber out. This was part of the remains of that old enterprise. We climbed all over it, and of course, I took pictures.

Riding the Ghost Train. I sat in the conductor's seat and fiddled with the gears.

Mom climbed up on the Ghost Train too

The front of the Ghost Train looked like the front of an old Ford truck

The rear view of the old train

Ghost Tracks, leading into the swamp...

Mom is going to be taking a friend out in the swamp in her kayak in a few days, and she had wanted to check out Kingfisher Landing as a possible point of entry. Unfortunately, while she had a guide-book to the Okefenokee that said use of Kingfisher Landing was free of charge, we got there and learned that you have to pay for a pass at the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge main entrance, about 25 or so miles away in Folkston. We figured as long as we were there near the car poking about, we wouldn't have to worry about being ticketed or towed, but without a pass she couldn't very well leave the van there and go off kayaking about and expect to return and find the thing un-ticketed. So, we decided to head down to the OWR to find out about buying passes in advance. Once we were in the OWR (where mom ended up purchasing the year-pass), we decided that we ought to do some exploration there as well.

The first thing we saw was a very bold red-shouldered hawk,
who posed for some pictures.

Then we drove down to the Chesser Island Homestead (at the end of a long, windy road through the pine-forested swamp), which we explored and then walked several miles out to a tower at the end of a boardwalk overlooking Seagrove Lake in the center of the swamp - beautiful!

Chesser Island Homestead

Me, on the boardwalk through the swamp

Swamp-view

Swamp/lake view from the tower

Swamp/lake view from the tower

Me, overlooking the lake/swamp

Mom, overlooking the lake/swamp

First full day back in the homeland

I almost bought a house today. Or well, I would have done, had they not already been purchased by other luckier and more timely individuals. Damn, damn. They were both astonishingly great deals (I'm not going to tell you how fantabulously affordable, because I don't want you wandering down here trying to beat me to the next great bargain), and it is disheartening to see what I could have had... I think I have managed to convince my mother that I am completely serious about relocating to Waycross, so perhaps next time she won't dilly-dally and wait for me to fly several thousand miles before paying a visit to the realtor. Or so I hope, hint, hint.

That's pretty much all I did today, after recovering from my 30 hours of traveling the previous day (and yes, you can fit 30 hours into your day if you're traveling east to west from Vladimir to Waycross), wrapping presents and going to the grocery store. Ahh the excitement. Well, we did drive around and look at some neighborhoods with old houses, and found two right next to one another that are not (and have not been) for sale, but which were obviously empty. We're planning to stop by the property appraiser's to find out who owns them... then we're going to make them an offer. I mean, if the places are empty, they may as well sell them (or well, one of them) to me. Is this madness? Probably. But it's damn fun.

All right, I've got to install some software on my mom's computer so I can finish and upload the newest version of my site. Stay tuned.

i'm here.....

i'm in waycross - safe, sound, and sleepy...

will write more later, once i do something blogworthy.

Going Home....

I'm headed home for the holidays tomorrow (there's been a lot of snow lately, so keep your fingers crossed that I have no problems getting to and from the Moscow airport!), and I'll be in Waycross, GA through January 6th. See you there :-)

(To see a rap video filmed in Waycross, click here. To buy a 2006 Waycross Calendar, click here.)